Center for Civic Media - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The MIT Center for Civic Media (formerly the Center for Future Civic Media) is a research and practical center that develops and implements tools that support political action and "the information needs of [civic] communities". Its mission reads in part:

The MIT Center for Civic Media creates and deploys technical and social tools that fill the information needs of communities.

We are inventors of new technologies that support and foster civic media and political action; we are a hub for the study of these technologies; and we coordinate community-based test beds both in the United States and internationally.

It was founded in 2007 as a joint effort of the MIT Media Lab

MIT Media Lab

The MIT Media Lab is a laboratory of MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Devoted to research projects at the convergence of design, multimedia and technology, the Media Lab has been widely popularized since the 1990s by business and technology publications such as Wired and Red Herring for a...

and the MIT Comparative Media Studies program. Its initial funding, a four-year grant from the Knight Foundation, was won in a contest "to foster blogs and other digital efforts that seek to bring together residents of a city or town in ways that local newspapers historically have done." The founders planned to "develop new technologies and practices to help newspapers attract readers as a greater number of Americans use the Internet as their primary news source." It expanded in 2011.

Staffed by academic, technical, and professional staff, the Center was originally led by Chris Csikszentmihályi, along with the Media Lab's Mitchel Resnick

Mitchel Resnick

Mitchel Resnick is LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research, Director of the Okawa Center, and Director of the at the MIT Media Lab. Resnick currently serves as the head of the Media Arts and Sciences academic program, the academic program that grants master's degrees and Ph.Ds at the MIT Media...

and Comparative Media Studies' Henry Jenkins

Henry Jenkins

Henry Jenkins III is an American media scholar and currently a Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, a joint professorship at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the USC School of Cinematic Arts...

. Ethan Zuckerman

Ethan Zuckerman

Ethan Zuckerman is the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, officially starting in September 2011.Zuckerman was one of the first staff members of Tripod.com, one of the first successful "dot com" enterprises, and later founder of Geekcorps and Global Voices Online...

was announced as the Center's new director in June 2011. Others affiliated with the center include Sasha Costanza-Chock

Sasha Costanza-Chock

Sasha Costanza-Chock is a communications scholar who teaches at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He researches social movements and communications technologies, and has written about immigrants in the U.S., the Federal Communications Commission, the CRIS campaign for communication rights, and...

, Benjamin Mako Hill

Benjamin Mako Hill

Benjamin Mako Hill is a Debian hacker, intellectual property researcher, activist and author. He is a contributor and free software developer as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects as well as the author of two best-selling technical books on the subject, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible and The...

, William Uricchio

William Uricchio

William Uricchio is a media scholar who teaches at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Utrecht University. He has written about Batman, Fernsehsender Paris, Vitagraph Studios, and "city symphony" film. His research often centers on "moments of transition and the dynamics that accompany them,"...

, Jing Wang

Jing Wang

Jing Wang is Professor of Chinese media and Cultural Studies and S.C. Fang Professor of Chinese Language & Culture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, She is soon to join MIT's Comparative Media Studies....

, and Jeffrey Warren

Jeffrey Warren

Jeffrey Warren is a fellow at the MIT Media Lab's Design Ecology Group. He is also the founder of Grassrootsmapping.org, which promotes public GIS for cartographic areas in dispute. Through Grassrootsmapping.org, Jeffrey has created prototypes for allowing regular members of the public to build...

Research and Development

The Center creates tools for deployment and testing in geographic communities. Like the Media Lab, the work is iterative, experimental, and draws in large part on the work of current graduate students. But unlike much other work at the Media Lab, Center tools are expected to have immediate applications, even if narrowly focused on a specific community's need.

With varying levels of adoption, deployed civic media tools and communities have included:

Grassroots Mapping (Gulf of Mexico oil spill; the Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn, Superfund site), a collection of cartographic tools and practices—such as best practices for using balloons, kites, inexpensive cameras, and open-source software—for citizens to produce their own aerial imagery. Grassroots Mapping grew into the larger Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, which won a $500,000 Knight News Challenge grant for its work.
Lost in Boston: Realtime (Boston, MA; South Wood County, WI, under the name Sameboat), displays local information in shared areas at low cost, such as using LED screens to diplay live bus arrival data in places people prefer to be, such as stores or coffeehops near bus stops rather than at bus stops themselves.
Sourcemap, which maps supply chains of consumer goods.
Between the Bars
Between the Bars (blog)
Between the Bars is an American blog that publishes letters from people held in prison in the United States. The open-source blog platform was developed by Charlie DeTar. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology hosts the website....

, a blogging platform for prisoners http://betweenthebars.org
Crónicas de Héroes/Hero Reports, a method for reporting small acts of civic heroism. (Utilized in Juárez, Mexico, and elsewhere)

Research and Development

Further reading